I borrow the title of this post from a post of the same name by Irving Wladawsky-Berger. Wladawsky-Berger has been one of my favorite bloggers for some time because of the breadth and depth of his writing and his useful pointers.
I bring this post to your attention because it examines the issue of blogging and writing, all to often written as blogging versus writing as if there was an either/or choice.
It’s worth a read for the useful ideas that we might find ways to pass on to other.
Earlier this week, we gave you the first part of a conversation between Jim Groom and Gardner Campbell on edupunk. Here’s part 2 in which Jim and Gardner get a bit more animated and debate further the the appropriateness of the punk metaphor, address questions of leadership and the politicization of ed tech. Enjoy.
[youtube width="480" height="385"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci3rZhftkFo[/youtube]
You might recall some discussion here of “edupunk,” a term coined by our old friend Jim Groom to describe approaches to teaching and learning that eschew mainstream, proprietary teaching tools in favor of open source technologies and do-it-yourself approaches. The term was, as some of you may recall, one of the New York Times’ Buzzwords of 2008.
We give you, then, the first in a series of videos in which Jim and Gardner Campbell of Baylor University — a new friend whose deft facilitation at last year’s Symposium made a tremendous contribution — discuss of the ideas behind edupunk and consider the appropriateness of the punk metaphor for the sorts of things that the edupunk movement embraces, promotes, and celebrates. Enjoy. We’ll post new episodes as they become available.
EASY DOES IT Barbara Ganley, near her home in Weybridge, Vt., thinks of blogging as a meditative art form. Photo by Caleb Kenna.
Some of us here at the Institute recently had the tremendous pleasure of sitting and chatting with Barbara Ganley, prolific blogger, educator, photographer, champion of social media for teaching and learning, and a great source of inspiration for the various and sundry edupunks we’ve been hanging around with lately. Barbara, who was recently profiled in the New York Times, is well known in the blogosphere as one of the voices that comprise the “slow blogging” movement. Like other slow bloggers, she uses her blog as a means of facilitating meditation and reflection rather than of delivering reportage. She writes long, thoughtful, meditative and sometimes infrequent posts that read more like artful reflective essays than typical, concise, rapid-fire blog posts.
An early adopter of online writing tools for pedagogical purposes, Barbara first used blogs in the classroom in the dark days of 2001 — coincidentally, on September 11 when students suddenly had the unfathomable to reflect upon. Since then, she has explored ways of employing blogs and other social media for a myriad pedagogical uses (both in and out of the world of academe) and offers a tremendous wealth of ideas on realizing their exciting promise for teaching and learning. Having left the academy after almost 20 years, Barabara recently founded Digital Explorations, a non-profit organization that explores the impact social media and digital story-telling tools can have on rural communities.
We learned a ton from chatting with Barbara and hope to find another occasion to do it again.
By the way, the way we arranged for Barbara’s visit to the Institute is a great illustration of her now famous aphorism, “Blog to reflect, Tweet to connect.” Barbara had indicated via Twitter that she was heading to NYC. I tweeted right back inviting her to come see us here at Baruch, she accepted, and there you have it.
Thanks, Barbara, for paying us a visit. Let’s work together soon.
I recently stumbled upon the work of Alexandra Juhasz, a media studies professor and “femi-digi practitioner.” While her writings on activist video interested me from the get-go, her blog persona, MP:me, has some interesting things to say about media theory and pedagogy, and more than a few choice words for the “leprous” stuff of YouTube. Knowing the incredible fervor with which our students race to imbibe pretty much anything they see on YouTube, the experiments she and her students engage in when analyzing YouTube were intriguing.
Speaking of which, I happened to meet someone the other day who works for iCue, which has thousands of video clips, news archives, and, by extension, sample speeches. I felt a little embarrassed that I’d never found it myself, since I regularly use YouTube for on-the-fly speech sample videos in class– and even specific assignments– and thereby end up modeling this YouTube over-reliance for my students. Finding a range of high quality sites for video content is something I would like to make one of my New Year’s resolutions, rather than acting surprised when students head to Youtube as the first and last stop for any kind of video content.
MP:me recently put out a call requesting help in her search for what she calls “productive fake docs” on YouTube. Maybe you’re more familiar than me with this sub-genre? The deadline for contributions is January:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJSCS_KxYAk[/youtube]
While leafing through an AM New York paper on Friday (yeah, yeah, I do that sometimes when riding the subway), I saw a short opinion piece by Ellis Henican that resonated with me. It’s one of the “old vs. new” debates, which are often controversial, and we often tend to either embrace the side of “the old” because of some sentimental feelings, or dismiss it as the bickering of the people who don’t understand how great “the new” is. But sometimes the arguments of “the old” are rather reasonable and shouldn’t be discounted right away.
Henican is quite bitter in his piece, describing blogging as “some self-absorbed nitwit sitting in front of a computer in his bathrobe, stealing the facts that some hard-working, low-paid newspaper drone just spent hours collecting,” but he has a point: bloggers do often get their facts by reading some other sources, be it newspapers or websites, because they often don’t have the time, the resources, or maybe even the desire to go out and do all the “dirty work” of going to crime scenes, sitting through court trials, reporting from war zones, doing the fact checking. Almost inevitably, if you get the facts that have already been retold by someone to their liking, you get a skewed picture; then you add your angle, and it gets even more skewed. And while this is good for something like philosophy, for news reporting it doesn’t seem like such a good idea. Of course, there are biased reporters and diligent bloggers, and sometimes a witness who has a blog can undermine a corrupt newspaper’s official point of view. But still, the overall state of affairs seems to be correct. And this is one of the reasons that it’s so upsetting to see the newspaper industry in such bad shape, and it would be a shame if the disappearing newspapers are replaced by nothing other than the “Bathrobe Boy” bloggers.
A field note from the wild, untamed frontier that is the Internet:
Godwin’s Law, posited by Mike Godwin in 1990, states that, in online forums, the longer a discussion thread goes on, the more likely it becomes that someone will compare someone else to Hitler or call them a Nazi in a heated argument. It draws an explicit a connection between on line discussions, especially in discussion forums and Usenet groups, to the logical fallacy of Reductio ad Hitlerum, coined in the 1950s by Leo Strauss, which is very basically the argument that, if Hitler’s regime was characterized by XYZ, then XYZ is inherently evil and invalid. “As an online discussion grows longer,” the original formulation of the law goes, “the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” Once that happens — once someone exercises the rhetorical equivalent of the nuclear option — the thread is effectively dead. Meaningful discussion is no longer possible. Once Nazis goose-step into your thread, it’s time to find a new one.
Those of us who have participated in online discussions of various stripes have seen Godwin’s law proven again and again, especially when someone conflates criticism of his or her position on the subject at hand with suppression of free expression. (An interesting example of such a conflation in another context can be seen here.) To wit:
You people have been criticizing my position on homemade v. canned cranberry sauce (Thanksgiving was just last week, after all) and, by doing so, you have violated my right to express my opinion. This is exactly what the Nazis did in Germany. You are worse than Hitler!
While one may initially get the impression that Godwin’s Law somehow trivializes the brutal historical significance of Nazi Germany, Godwin notes that the law first came to be as a means of countering such obviously absurd trivializations in heated online discussions. Writing 18 years after first having created the law, Godwin explains his motivation like this:
It was difficult, after attempting a greater psychological understanding of why the Holocaust happened and how it was conducted, to tolerate the glib comparisons I encountered on the Internet (Usenet in those days). My sense of moral outrage at this phenomenon found an outlet after I read an article in in the Whole Earth Review about memes—viral ideas—that inspired me to create a kind of counter-measure. And so I created Godwin’s Law and began to repeat it in online forums whenever I encountered a silly comparison of someone or something to Hitler or to the Nazis. (source)
I’ll move that Godwin’s law can only work as a counter-measure in this way is if it is cited when a comparison to Nazis occurs — something like “Godwin’s Law: proven again!” Useful here is the Dodd Corollary to Godwin’s original law, which states that whoever invokes the Nazis in an online debate is automatically discredited for doing so and loses the argument. The Dodd Corollary highlights the triviality and the warped sense of history implicit in such comparisons. If I call you a Nazi because you vehemently disagree with my argument that canned cranberry sauce is superior to all other kinds of cranberry sauce, I lose the argument because I was stupid enough to conflate your position with the ideology of an iconically repressive, genocidal regime. I obviously need to reevaluate how passionately I feel about canned cranberry sauce.
For more on Godwin’s Law, see the Godwin’s Law FAQ. (Hat tip to Zach Davis.)
Imagine a nanny texting her young ward in the next room to ask, “Juice or Milk?” Imagine a young girl awakened in the middle of the night by her father’s video-chat invitation from Mumbai. Imagine a young man so isolated that the idea of being in the same city as his girlfriend is considered too much commitment. Shocked yet?
Probably not. Still, these are some of the tidbits from our wacky wired world that take center stage in Continuous City, a recent multimedia piece at the Brooklyn Academy of Music created by the tech-savvy Builder’s Association. According to its marketing tagline, the play “explores our accelerated relationships in a sprawling multimedia world.” J.V. (Rizwan Mirza) is an internet entrepreneur trying to strike it big with a new social networking tool, XUBU, by tapping into markets in expanding cities around the globe. He has enlisted Mike (Harry Sinclair), an urban anthropologist, to trot from metropolis to metropolis, attempting to drum up financial and popular support for this revolutionary (and potentially lucrative) new tool. At home in the states, Mike’s daughter Sam (Olivia Timothee) grows distant and depressed while her nanny Deb (Moe Angelos) works on her new video-blog. Poor Mike begins unraveling as the stress of travel and distance from Sam begins to gnaw away at his faith in the power of the product. (Perhaps not surprisingly, the director’s note mentions both Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” and Mike Davis’ “Slum Cities” as inspirations for the piece.) Here’s the trailer:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HISxK5Pr_ok[/youtube]
In theory, there seemed to be a lot in this performance that would be of interest to students of communication, which is why I brought my COM 1010 class to see it. And the play earnestly tries to raise questions about our faith in digital communication (particularly in connecting “global cities”) and its limits. There are two conventional stage spaces (depicting the Xubu office space as well as Sam’s bedroom), and, thanks to a dizzying array of video screens, we jump between cities with a pace that would probably wear out even Bill Clinton.
Within this media mess, some genuinely fun innovating goes down: J.V.’s videochats with his family are actually live and unrehearsed videochats with the actor’s family members, and the video blogging done by Deb changes with every city the show tours. Perhaps coolest of all, there’s a phony website for Xubu.cc where anyone can record a message that might be used in the show as an example of Xubu.
My students were unexcited by the prospect of recording their own Xubu video messages, and they claimed to be confused by the frenetic non-linearity of the performance. They seemed to be more attracted to the slickness of its screens than anything else, and at one point during the show I turned around to find two of them sharing i-pod buds; a strange confirmation that perhaps some of the themes of the play both resonated and didn’t.
It is true that, as my friend put it, some of the conceits behind Continuous City felt a tad cliché (“We can’t communicate! Or remember our daughter’s birthday!”), even while it would seem that this is a company on the cutting edge of exploring the uses of this technology in performance. All of the miscommunication seemed to fudge up the rhythm of the dialogue in a way that was more distracting than anything else— the frustration that motivates many of us to just hang up on someone when we have a really bad connection is the way I would explain the emotional response that the play elicited in me. As an audience member, watching other people unsuccessfully multitask or attempt to navigate the impossibilities of time zone coordination tended to alienate more often than engage.
Along with all of this, Continuous City also allowed me reflect a bit on my own relationship to video chatting, as I’ve very recently become acquainted with this weird plane. While it of course hasn’t been a perfect experience, it’s made a tough long-distance communication situation better, not worse. (I couldn’t help wondering if Mike would have been a crappy father even if he lived in the same city as the neglected Sam.) Trying to sustain a meaningful conversation over video chat can be strange and self-conscious; at one moment it feels like an invaluable alternative to the tinny-ness of cellphone, and at others it feels boring and fractured.
For all its benefits, my v-chat experiences have also made me dubious about people actually doing business over this thing, which was also exposed in J.V.’s frantic video-conferencing; video chatting seemed to reveal itself as a horrible way to try to be productive and/or efficient. It didn’t surprise me to see that the video chatting done by the characters in the play was most successful during the simple moments of visual playfulness—like when Mike puts his computer camera on the grass in a park and plays virtual hide-and-go-seek with Sam. In its current incarnation, it often feels like a blessedly unproductive medium somehow, maybe because it creates intimacy by forcing you to sit down and focus on someone (on a screen) in an engaged, patient way; there’s no masking of any other activities, and, most of all, you need to really work to catch the freaky rhythms of the conversation. All of which, of course, we don’t necessarily manage to do even when we happen to be sharing time zones.
We here at the Institute are very excited about this bit of publicity: the current issue of Change Magazine, published in cooperation with The Carnegie Foundation For the Advancement of Teaching, features a profile of the Schwartz Institute written by Fara Warner, whom some of you may remember from last year’s Symposium. Fara’s article, entitled “Improving Communication is Everyone’s Responsibility” is a lengthy, in-depth discussion of the Institute and the tremendously varied work that we do here at Baruch College. Take a look. Here’s a snippet:
The Institute
To understand how the Institute was created—and has grown into a model for developing and supporting communication-intensive curricula—you have to look at the college’s history and its extraordinarily diverse student body.Baruch’s beginnings stretch back to 1847. Its Newman Vertical Campus is now located at Lexington and 24th Street in Manhattan, one block from the original site of the Free Academy, the country’s first free institution of higher education. In 1919, the City University system created a school of business and civic administration on the site of the Academy. The next year, it added a master’s degree in business administration. In 1953, the college was renamed in honor of Bernard M. Baruch, the statesman and financier who had been instrumental in the college’s creation. In 1968, Baruch College became a freestanding college within the City University of New York. The College currently encompasses the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, the School of Public Affairs, and the Zicklin School of Business—now the largest school of business in the nation.
Even in its early years, the college was known for its diversity, drawing its student body from the immigrant populations that called New York City home. Over the years, those populations have changed from Italian, Jewish, and German to today’s immigrants from countries such as Turkey, Uzbekistan, and China. Approximately one-third of Baruch students were born outside the U.S., and half are the children of immigrants. About 90 percent of Baruch’s undergraduate students graduated from New York City’s public and parochial high schools, and more than half come from families with an income of less than $44,000 annually. The college’s nearly 16,000 students speak 110 languages and come from 160 countries—prompting publications such as U.S. News and World Report and the Princeton Review to name it “the most diverse university in the U.S.”
“The college always had to operate with the knowledge that for many of its students English wasn’t just their second language but sometimes their third or fourth,” says Professor Paula Berggren, who has worked extensively with the Institute to enhance students’ writing and oral communication skills in Great Works of Literature courses, which all Baruch students are required to take. Moreover, “in the U.S., we don’t know how to communicate even if we’re native English speakers.” By the mid-1990s, the combination of a school devoted to teaching business skills and a diverse and underprepared student body had created a situation in which “Baruch was turning out competent vocationally trained students who lacked an ease with communication,” Berggren says.
Baruch faculty members weren’t the only ones who noticed the problem. Over the decades, Baruch had gained a reputation for turning out highly capable business majors who got very desirable jobs in accounting and other business sectors. But major employers reported that Baruch graduates sometimes lacked confidence, sophistication, and facility in business communication. The problem wasn’t lost on the college’s alumni either—including Bernard L. Schwartz, the former chairman and chief executive officer of Loral Space & Communication, who had graduated from Baruch with a bachelor’s of science degree in finance. He believed that Baruch needed to do a better job of teaching students real-world communication skills in addition to their core studies. In 1997 he donated the initial funding to create the Institute that now bears his name, with the expressed wish to help Baruch students become more effective communicators.
There are a number of ways to teach and enhance oral and written communication, from required communication-specific courses and formal academic support units to loose, informal programs driven primarily by individual faculty members. Baruch created an organization that operated somewhere between those two extremes. A few core principles and organizing structures were set down that have guided the Institute, but room was left for creativity and evolution stimulated by the changing needs of faculty and students and by technological developments.
The Institute isn’t housed under a specific department—English or communication studies, for instance. In keeping with the idea that communication is everyone’s responsibility, it operates under the Office of the Provost and remains independent of any one department’s requirements or direct control. It also receives private funds (including ongoing support from Schwartz), giving it flexibility in the breadth, depth, and scope of the programs it offers. It invites outsiders, most notably from the business world, to discuss communication issues that are of importance to the employers who hire Baruch students. Each year, the Institute hosts an annual symposium that brings together faculty and business executives to explore areas of mutual concern, such as the role of new technologies in shaping criteria for effective communication in academic and business contexts.
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